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It turns out that expert Mini Motorways players never let a spare road tile languish unused, when it could be influencing the future of the city. This is, in fact, a popular advanced tactic, where odd road tiles are placed to manipulate the spawning of houses and businesses into more favorable locations. The seemingly useless roads affect the system, corralling the larger buildings into different locations. Then the city responds to these ill fitting shapes. Like a disenfranchised spray-can painter, independent and anarchic. Organized roads serving as paths of profit sit beside arcane squiggles, asphalt graffiti of unknown meaning. A rejection of the neatness in this design, an element of purposeless defiance.

Pointless shapes can be drawn, doodles on graph paper, the art of the disillusioned worker. You can place random strands of disconnected road anywhere on the grid, as long as you have spare road tiles. You may look to other tactics to escape these implications. Although you may work to make your city aesthetically pleasant, ensuring it is a good city is another issue entirely. You will do it all to get those numbers higher and you will enjoy it. If you want to succeed you will segregate your neighborhoods by color, you will erect motorways across the whole city and you will destroy vegetation to squeeze every last meter of asphalt into the map. The tactics of the game compound this, as the best strategies for getting a long lasting, high-scoring run are always the most antisocial. The public transit systems of the previous game have never seemed further away. Your city is defined by roads, private business and individual cars, with no regard for anything public or shared. The game lays bare this design trick of hiding function behind form, exploitation behind attractive interface.Įach location’s culture is irrelevant, its layout ever-changing, driven systematically to make more and more money. Mini Motorways may start as a relaxing abstraction, but eventually players are pulled behind the curtain, asked to run an increasingly dystopian city for profit. Houses are little more than garages where the cars idle in anticipation of the next job. The game’s tiny cars are like those of many delivery apps, identical to one another and all perfect workers eager only to provide and earn. There is the pin icon, as homogenized by Google Maps, a sure indication of something important, which here balloons over businesses when they need more player attention, more labor, a growing warning bubble near to bursting. Mini Motorways uses this design language in ways which highlight some of these more unpleasant implications. Their enticing user experience provides a veneer over profitable capitalist techniques like extreme surveillance and the dehumanization of workers. They also share the same underlying urgency, addictiveness and dream of endless growth. Often these businesses use a simple visual identity and chase the same accessibility and pleasing feel to their animations and design. Mini Motorways has a lot in common with the maps used by tech companies on the most popular websites and apps. Motorways lie strewn across neighborhoods like spent ticker tape. Eventually and inevitably your city fails, unable to keep pace with the appetite of capital. Growth continues and things get more complex, more stressful.

You pause time to reorder the city, neaten every road and feel some small satisfaction. As your run continues and the city grows, more businesses appear, their needs growing greater as commuters jostle through congested traffic at crossroads. Everything connects to your roads which snap neatly onto an underlying grid as you place them.Įach run of Mini Motorways starts out simply, like one red office near two red houses. It’s small and cute abstracted versions of Tokyo or Los Angeles are presented in gentle color palettes the map is peppered with tiny Monopoly-style houses. In Mini Motorways, you place road tiles to connect color-coded businesses with the homes of potential workers. Its sequel, Mini Motorways, could easily be described as “the same, except it’s cars.” There is, however, a murkier underside to the follow-up title, which develops a surprisingly effective satire. Mini Metro was a pleasing, inoffensive game about creating a public train system.